Men in Black: Eyes on the Prize. © Getty Images

For adults, watching cricket is a kind of schoolboy dreaming. It offers the possibility of perfect resolutions…not just a happy ending but a perfect happy ending, the sort that real life doesn't deliver. Actually, nor does cricket. But on the 24th, it did.

The Sri Lanka-New Zealand match wasn't a great one-day match, because it wasn't much of a contest, but for the spectator who'd picked the right side (like me) it was the most perfectly satisfying game to watch. Had this been one of Wodehouse's cricket stories, Mahela Jayawardene would have replaced Mike Jackson and the book would have been called Mahela at Wrykyn which doesn't sound as snappy as the original (Mike at Wrykyn) but it'll do.

Our hero, Mahela, is sitting in his study pencilling in the team for the match against Wrykyn's rival school, Sedleigh. Jayasuriya to open: that's a no-brainer, but Tharanga? Not only is he in a junior form but lots of the prefects are backing Atapattu who's a fine bat, a senior man in the Sixth, who had skippered the team before Mahela replaced him, so the team sheet is a tricky business. But Mahela holds his nerve and pencils in Tharanga's name.

The next day the cricket match goes like a Boy's Own Paper fantasy. Mahela wins the toss and makes the right call, to bat. Tharanga repays Mahela's confidence by scoring an aggressive fifty that gives the innings momentum despite early wickets. When he falls, MJ's in first gear, but by the time Wrykyn's innings ends, he's smacking Sedleigh's fast men to all parts. Just think of it: Mahela calls right, backs the right man and scores an unbeaten century at faster than a run a ball to set up a massive win.

The reason Wodehouse didn't write this novel is because he specialized in plausible school stories centred on cricket and this one's plot line was too good to be true. There's no conflict, no tension, and Mahela walks on water. But you know what? Fans are coarse spectators: they'll take all the good news they can get.

And listen, I've been thinking about the final. Ponting wins the toss and puts Sri Lanka in on a fast Barbadian track. Big mistake. Jayasuriya and Sanagakkara failed at the right time, the match before. So they're due big scores and they get them. Then Tharanga and Mahela fool everyone by beating the odds and doing it all over again. Lightning strikes twice, Atlantis surfaces and McGrath goes for 60 in eight overs. 289 for 2 this time. By the time the innings ends, it's past my bedtime and I sleep through Murali and Malinga's Punch and Judy show. When I wake up in the morning, they've won.

	An elimination after the opening round will have serious repercussions, financially © Getty Images

For Indian fans, India's virtual elimination from the cricket World Cup so early in the competition is a crushing disappointment. For the television channels that bought rights to beam the tournament to these fans, Friday's defeat is a financial disaster. But for the tournament itself, nothing could have been more tonic than the purging of Pakistan and India, the dysfunctional giants of South Asian cricket. Instead of these glowering bruisers, it looks as though the extravagantly gifted Sri Lankans and the plucky Bangladeshis shall represent South Asia in the next round, the Super 8.

The rest of the piece can be read at the BBC website here

	'Nationalism aside, Kumar Sangakkara is my favourite cricketer' © Getty Images

Full disclosure: I want India to win. There must be evolved cricket fans out there who don't let vulgar ideas like nationalism affect their pleasure in the game, but I don't know of any. Actually that's not true: I know of one: Mike Marqusee. He wrote one of the three best books ever written on the history of cricket: Anyone But England (the other two are CLR James's Beyond the Boundary and Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field). Mike doesn't count: he's an American and he doesn't have a home team to back. We do.

But when our better selves take over, when we remember first things, like the joy of accidentally middling the ball and hearing it 'thunk' off the sweet spot of the bat, it's sometimes fun to imagine who you'd want to win the Cup if you were a neutral, like Marqusee, or a Martian.

When I'm being extra-terrestrial, I want Sri Lanka to win.

The Sri Lankan team makes me smile. Do I think it's going to win the World Cup? I've no idea. The function of pre-World Cup journalism isn't astrology: it's job is to find believable reasons for enthusiasm and prejudice.

Sri Lanka has the most interesting team in the Cup. They open with Sanath Jayasuriya, the arch-heretic of modern cricket: he breaks every rule in the book and yet he is one of the most effective ODI allrounders in contemporary cricket. He plays nearly every single shot with the bat angled and the bat face open, and he lifts the ball more often than he plays it along the ground and despite this he's probably won more matches for Sri Lanka off his own bat than any one else on that team. Upul Tharanga is a good partner for him: he had a wonderful tour of England and hit two centuries in the Champions Trophy, so if Jayasuriya gives us a half-decent swansong, Sri Lanka's likely to be off to some great starts.

The captain, Mahela Jayawardene and his predecessor, Marvan Atapattu are better at the longer game but they've adapted orthodoxy to the needs of one-day cricket and when they're in form, they make reliability seem a graceful and attractive quality.

Nationalism aside, Kumar Sangakkara is my favourite cricketer. His record in Tests is better than his ODI record, but an average of 36 and a strike rate of 75 is very respectable for a top-order player who also keeps wicket. But that isn't why I like him. Like a good desi I'm a sucker for anyone who talks a good game and I've never heard a cricketer speak as lucidly and impressively as he does. There's a two part interview on Cricinfo with Sanjay Manjrekar where he's so sharp and so fluent that he makes Mike Brearley seem inarticulate. And unlike Brearley, this guy can bat—he averages over fifty as a Test batsman—and keep wickets.

The one thing this Sri Lankan team seems to lack is an intimidating batsman who comes in after the openers and can, if required, take the game away from the opposition with pure aggression. Aravinda de Silva came to the wicket at Eden Gardens during the semi-finals of the 1996 World Cup, after Sri Lanka had lost a couple of early wickets, and destroyed us. He just decided that the bowlers had to go…and they went. Sangakkara might become that sort of batsman in time, but he isn't there yet. Australia is a great team because Ricky Ponting can walk in after an early wicket, watch a couple more fall and still go for the bowling as if it were business as usual. (The Indian team is particularly bad at dealing with the loss of early wickets: despite the enormous experience and talent in the batting line-up, its instinct is to hunker down like a besieged garrison.)

The Sri Lankan bowling is a constant delight. Chaminda Vaas, little more than medium now, is a canny old fox and his batting gets better all the time. Dilhara Fernando reminds me of the tall West Indian quicks of yore, right down to the bounce he gets off the wicket and the stress fractures. Facing Fernando and Lasith Malinga operating in tandem must be weirdly disorienting: one minute the ball's steepling down at you from eight feet; the next second your radar's trying to home in on a low flying missile slung at you from under five.

After his destruction of the West Indies in the Champions Trophy, Farveez Maharoof seems a real prospect though he'll have to compete with Dilhara for a place in the eleven. And then, of course, we have the great man himself, Muttiah Muralitharan. Sri Lanka missed him in their tour of India before the World Cup, though to be fair to the Indians, they're such good players of spin that Murali's never really been a mortal threat. But the man has more than four hundred wickets at twenty-three runs apiece at an economy-rate under four runs an over. If you were picking the bowling attack for a World IX you'd pencil him in right after Glenn McGrath.

So speaking strictly as an alien, I want to see an Australia-Sri Lanka final. And should the Sri Lankans win, it'll be nice if they don't take the trophy off to be blessed by the Buddhist clergy like they did the last time they were champions. Murali, Farveez, Atapattu, Malinga and the rest of the team do their best for Sri Lanka, not for some majoritarian Sinhala Buddhist state. Nationalisms that exalt a dominant faith dishonour the collective effort that makes team games special. They should have no place in cricket.

	Shoaib and Asif were the Pakistan squad's death-or-glory artillery boys. Then their habits got to them © AFP

In this the150th anniversary year of the rebellion of 1857, a good way of understanding the Pakistani squad is to see it as a company of turbulent sepoys. The Pakistan Cricket Board is the palace, racked by coups and intrigue. There's no real constituted authority, no legitimizing election (this being a pre-modern state) and every now and then the portly JCO in nominal charge of Pak Company, is challenged by an ambitious deputy.

Their dashing colonel who, some years ago, had whipped them into a fighting unit with a strange mix of paternalism, coercion, egotism and personal example, and successfully led them into battle, is now retired but watches from the sidelines. He doesn't approve of the foreign mercenary who has taken the sepoys in hand and sometimes allows his patrician exasperation with his talented but plebeian proteges, to show.

Looking at this endearing mob of M.A.S.H. style misfits, you wouldn't know that it is, in fact, a company of elite soldiers, first-rate fighting men. Those two big fellows over there in glitzy mufti, shamming injury, and suspected of emptying some dull opiate to the drains till a few weeks ago, were the squad's death-or-glory artillery boys, its big guns. Then their habits got to them. Now they're convalescing, poor chaps, certain to miss the big battles coming up.

But the company is so crammed with talented, testosterone-driven heroes that their absence shouldn't necessarily hamstring its forthcoming campaign. Subedar Major I.U. Haq has great phlegm and can hold a position forever. Lance Naik Afridi, urf Shaheed, (sometimes reduced to the ranks for recklessness beyond the call of duty), can turn a skirmish into a rout single-handed, but it is never clear whether his actions will cause Pak Company to be the router or the routee. Naib Subedar Yousuf, always a fine marksman, has in the past year become infallible, his conversion ratio of shots to hits nearly perfect. Subedar Y. Khan, a fine strategic thinker and no mean shot himself, was long ago singled out by Colonel I. Khan (no relation) as officer material.

One of the recurrent frustrations of Pak Company has been its inexplicable failure to defeat the Light Blues in world tourneys despite defeating them in other, bilateral battles. Subedar Major Haq has been working on this with Pak Company's new secret weapon: the prayer huddle. This formation's solitary drawback is the possibility of being ambushed from behind while bonding in faith. Naib Subedar Yousuf, however, has solved that problem by suggesting that Sepoy Kaneria, surplus to requirement in the prayer huddle as Yousuf himself once was, ought to act as a look-out.

On the face of it, Pak Company shouldn't have a prayer this time round: it comes to the tournament without its fastest and best bowlers, uncertainty about its opening pair, and a recurrent tendency to come unglued in moments of stress. Colonel Khan, who is an expert witness as far as Pakistan is concerned, thinks that the team's preparation for the World Cup has been the worst ever that he can recall and I'm not going to argue with him.

But if I was a betting man looking for big returns on a small investment, I'd put some money on Inzamam's men. The Pakistan team has two things going for it:

a) The absence of Shoaib Akhtar is a huge bonus whether the team knows it or not. The operatic absurdness of his behavour subverted the authority of the coach and deranged the whole team.

b) Pak Company is never short of talent. It's selectors behave like fickle recruiting sergeants, drafting in gifted eagle-eyed rookies and then dumping them after a skirmish or two. A case in point is Sepoy A. Mehmood, a fine all-terrain fighter, forced to seek foreign employment because he inexplicably fell out of favour. Most teams would find their cupboards bare after such prodigal behaviour, but Pakistan still has all the fast bowling talent it needs and in Afridi, Razzaq, Mehmood and Shoaib Malik, it has a string of ODI all-rounders who can, when the stars align and when they remember to put their brains in gear, turn matches on their own. It goes without saying that in Younis Khan, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammad Yousuf, the team has batsmen of real class.

Pakistan's largest liability is its captain, who seems to have outsourced inspiration and leadership to that offshore Entity, the great Call Centre in the Sky. Contrast the way Inzamam blundered about, clueless, in the team's confrontation with Darrell Hair, with Ranatunga's clinical, ruthless defence of Muralitharan when he was called for chucking in Australia. Whatever the rights and wrongs of those confrontations, Ranatunga was in charge of events while Inzamam was hostage to them. If World Cup rules (like those of the Davis Cup) allowed non-playing captains and if Colonel I. Khan was willing to fill that bill, Pakistan would a real contender for the Cup. Even without a first-rate captain, Pak Company remains a serious threat to every other team in the competition.

	'If this West Indies team wins the World Cup, international cricket will have to take its temperature to check if it’s sick' © Getty Images

This current West Indian squad has to be understood as a cast of characters in a sad fairy tale called Lara and the Eleven Dwarfs (if you count the twelfth man); sad, because there doesn’t seem to be a happy end in sight. Regardless of home advantage, if this team wins the World Cup, international cricket will have to take its temperature to check if it’s sick. I’ll be thrilled if the Windies win, because cricket needs a successful West Indies side to feel normal, but Lara’s team (no pun intended) is so second rate that if it gets to the final, world cricket ought to worry about how competitive it is. (Though, come to think of it, India won the 1983 Cup with a team that bore a passing resemblance to the present West Indian outfit. It was a team with one alpha male champion and a bunch of bit players who just happened to play out of their skins.)

I grew up in a world where West Indian supremacy was an unchanging fact of life. When Australia defeated the West Indies in 1995, it was the first test series the team had lost in fifteen years. Now that’s dominance; even more remarkably, despite this near-endless reign, they weren’t loathed. The rest of the cricket world actually liked them.

The three Ws were a bit before my time, but their legend endured and their successors, the ones I actually saw play, were epic enough to satisfy the most stringent fan. Sobers, Kanhai, Lloyd, Hall, Griffith, Gibbs made up my first instalment of heroes and then, in 1974 on their tour of India, I saw a new trinity of gods make its entrance: Gordon Greenidge, Viv Richards and Andy Roberts. Lloyd was captain by now and we haven’t even mentioned Roy Fredericks, Alvin Kallicharran, Lawrence Rowe and, not least, Michael Holding (who debuted the next year). The Caribbean assembly line just kept turning out titans: Malcolm Marshall, Desmond Haynes, Joel Garner, Curtley Ambrose, Richie Richardson, Courtney Walsh and so on.

What went wrong? I think I know what happened to the West Indies, though the more important question, why it happened, is a mystery. For some reason, the islands stopped producing fast bowlers. If you look at the West Indian squad, its batting is okay. Not stellar, but serviceable. There’s Lara, of course, (who ought to be pickled because he embodies West Indian batsmanship in all its flourishing glory and he doesn’t seem to have any successors), but there’s also Ramnaresh Sarwan and Chris Gayle and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who, once you get past the hideous stance, is a resilient bat.

	Oh ... for a Viv Richards © Getty Images

The trouble is that great West Indian sides were defined not by their batsmen but by their fast bowlers. Important as Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd, Alvin Kallicharran etc. were to their sides, the fast men — Michael Holding, Andy Roberts and Malcolm Marshall — were more crucial still. And I mean ‘fast’ bowlers, not fast-medium or medium-fast or medium. The reason Courtney Walsh kept going as long as he did was because as a loyal servant of West Indian cricket, he tried to buy time for the islands to produce someone to whom he could pass the fast bowling flame. But no one turned up.

The present squad has one bowler, Jerome Taylor, who is genuinely quick. There’s Corey Collymore, a decent fast-medium bowler with some experience; Dwayne Bravo, a promising all-rounder but no more than medium-fast, and then there’s Daren Powell, a twenty-eight year old rookie of no great promise, who is billed as fast-medium. A team that used to have a battery of four quicks, with a couple of others, equally fast, on the bench, doesn’t have a single exceptional bowler. Sri Lanka has a scarier pace attack. Mashrafe Murtaza and Sreesanth would fancy their chances (given the right passport) of forcing their way into this West Indian team.

The squad has three players of Indian origin: Chanderpaul, Sarwan and Denesh Ramdin, the wicket-keeper. That’s unusual. ‘East Indian’ players always figured in West Indian teams — Sonny Ramadhin, Rohan Kanhai, Alvin Kallicharran, Raphick Jumadeen to name a few — but in ones or (rarely) twos. One speculative explanation for this larger presence is that the poor rural Indian communities of Guyana and Trinidad supply an increasing proportion of West Indian cricketers because they haven’t yet been seduced by American television and the NBA. If that’s true, it might explain the decline of West Indian fast bowling because India and its diaspora aren’t exactly famous for producing tearaway quicks.

On the other hand, I’ve also heard West Indian commentators rubbish the idea that Afro-Caribbean youngsters, having found new role models in black American basketball players, are abandoning cricket en masse. A lack of infrastructure, arguments about central contracts, the difficulties inherent in managing a team made up of citizens from several nations are some of the many causes cited for the absence of good fast bowlers.

So there isn’t one persuasive theory for the extinction of West Indian quicks any more than there is a reasonable explanation for the recent awfulness of West Indian fielding. Right through the Sixties and Seventies, the West Indies were the best fielding side in the world. Sobers, Lloyd, Richards, Greenidge set very high standards when it came to litheness and sure-handedness and speed. Recent West Indian squads have been almost comically inept in the field. How has this come to pass is even more baffling than the decline in the quality of their fast-bowling, because most people assume (perhaps wrongly) that fielding skills, based as they are upon a culture of outdoor sport and athleticism, ought to be more resistant to the fluctuations in form that plague batsmen and bowlers.

I hope the West Indian team has a great World Cup: which is to say, I hope it gets to the semi-finals. Getting that far would be a coup. Getting further would be a schoolboy romance: wonderful for nostalgists like me, but a poor advertisement for contemporary cricket.

Postscript:

In response to the post on Australia, I read more than one comment making the point that the West Indies, who dominated cricket before the Australians took over, were as arrogant, thuggish and verbal as the Australians. A reader reminded all of us of the way the fast bowling quartet used to demoralize opposing batsmen by injuring and intimidating them. As an Indian fan I need no reminders: I remember vividly Bedi throwing in the towel with half the Indian team left to bat.

But, with respect, there is a difference. And Sunil Gavaskar, who, helmet-less, scored more runs against more West Indian fast bowlers than anyone else in the world has testified to this difference over and over again. Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Curtley Ambrose, Andy Roberts and Courtney Walsh let the ball do the talking. A look, as Gavaskar is fond of saying, a narrowed stare and they were back to their marks, leaving the batsman wondering anxiously if there wasn't a safer way of making a living than taking guard against this lot. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, but like Gavaskar, I find the sight of Lee or McGrath (or Sreesanth) following through all the way up to the batsman, snarling obscenities, unpleasant, unnecessary and a form of sharp practice. I like Sreesanth but I find his elaborate aggro as a bowler ridiculous: he doesn't even look the part. If he wants a role model in the business of menace, he'd be better off studying archival footage of Malcolm Marshall. (I have to confess, though, that I find Sreesanth's bat-twirling, hip pumping routine as a batsman wholly wonderful, specially as a response to abusive bowlers like Andre Nel.)

An earlier version of this post published in The Telegraph, Kolkata, is available here

	Like any good political machine that operates on the margins of the straight-and-narrow, the Australians have the rhetoric of respectability pat (Click to enlarge) © Getty Images

Cricket sides are creatures with personalities. If the World Cup is cricket’s greatest stage, the teams are its characters. And if we’re going to work our way through the cast, it’s appropriate to begin with the hero of the last Cup and the one before that: Australia.

Australia is a protection racket gone legit. You can see glimpses of the lawlessness in Ricky Ponting’s early delinquency, in Shane Warne and Mark Waugh’s brush with bookies, in Glenn McGrath’s snarling unloveliness, in the constant sledging, the occasional racial slur (Darren Lehmann’s ‘black c__ts’ for example), in the pleasure the Australians take in their rep as bully boys. When I watch Ponting spit into the palms of his hands and rub them together, some shabby-genteel part of me cringes, and a stereotype is reinforced. With the exception of Adam Gilchrist (whose popularity shows you that with a sprinkling of good humour, the Aussies could have been liked, not just admired) they feel like political operators with knuckle-dusters, conducting a dirty but legal election campaign.

But like any good political machine that operates on the margins of the straight-and-narrow, the Australians have the rhetoric of respectability pat. A year or so ago, Ponting began to make pious noises about Australians setting standards of good behaviour on the field. A kinder, gentler Australian team is about as likely as the Godfather giving himself up to the olive oil trade, but Ponting knows that in these politically correct times it’s important to talk the talk. At its best the Australian team is a mafia with flair: watching Warne, McGrath and Gilchrist hoodwink, harry and hammer the opposition over the last decade has been the great spectacle of contemporary cricket.

But with McGrath in decline, and without Warne and Brett Lee, the Australians seem duller, their bowling seems efficient rather than devastating, almost South African in its sameness. Mike Hussey is a batting phenomenon: his runs, his average put him in the highest company, but there is an ordinariness, an anonymity to his presence at the crease which makes his record even more remarkable than it is. Matthew Hayden, Hussey and Ponting are fine batsmen by any measure but where Gilchrist’s genial aggression makes me grin even when it’s India that’s suffering, these three come across as bouncers working you over, not debonair bandits pulling off a heist. If the Australians were to be cast in a movie, they’d be Al Capone’s gang in The Untouchables, and I’d be rooting for Costner to bust them.

	Irfan Pathan’s more likely to replace an out of form batsman, than a specialist bowler © AFP

Apart from Ramesh Powar, it’s difficult to think of anyone else who might have had a claim to the bowling places in India’s World Cup squad. S. Rajesh’s excellent statistical analysis
of Shaun Pollock’s recent ODI record on cricinfo.com, has a table listing the best one-day bowling averages since 2006. Powar is number 8 on that list and the highest ranked Indian. He has taken 24 wickets in in sixteen ODIs in this period which compares well with the the bowler on top of the list, Shaun Pollock, who has taken 37 wickets in 24 matches.

To be fair to the selectors, figures don’t always tell you much. The man whose spot Powar might have taken, Irfan Pathan, is tenth on that list with 36 wickets in 25 matches, one less than Pollock with one more match played. And we know that Pollock has hit a rich vein of form in the past year while Pathan’s bowling has fallen away so much that he’s in the World Cup squad as a pinch-hitter who, with luck, might get through half a dozen overs. When he gets to play a World Cup match, Pathan’s more likely to replace an out of form batsman, than a specialist bowler.

Scenario 1: Robin Uthappa doesn’t come off. Tendulkar moves up to open with Ganguly and instead of bringing Karthik in as a specialist batsman, the team management opts for Pathan as a decent outfielder, a more than useful batsman who can play up or down the order, and someone who can smuggle in a few overs through the middle passages of a game.

Scenario 2: Virender Sehwag’s dreadful form continues. Given that India routinely plays six batsmen and four bowlers, Dravid and Chappell decide that Pathan is a better all-round replacement for Sehwag (who usually shares the fifth bowler’s quota with Tendulkar) than Dinesh Karthik.

I think Dravid will be desperate to play Pathan if five of his six main batsmen fire because Pathan playing to seventy five percent of his potential as a bowler would appear to balance the side out. Dravid’s stated preference is to play five bowlers and playing Pathan gives him at least four-and-three-quarters.

If I’m right in this, I can’t see Karthik getting an opportunity except as a replacement for an injured Dhoni or, as a longer shot, if Yuvraj is unfit. Yuvraj doesn’t bowl any more, so Karthik for Yuvraj would be a straightforward batsman for batsman swap with no bowling considerations coming into play.

All of this presumes that the main batsmen do well. If the first couple of games find the battting wobbling, Karthik automatically becomes the favoured replacement.

You don’t have to be an a genius to know that the Indian team will start its campaign with Zaheer Khan Munaf Patel, Ajit Agarkar and Harbhajan Singh. I’m not sure I understand why Harbhajan is an automatic choice for the spinning spot in ODIs but the good thing about having bowlers as good as Sreesanth and Kumble on the bench is that the players they replace in the event of injury or poor form, won’t be hugely missed.

But I’ll miss Powar’s waddle, his fearlessly flighted teasers, those glaring red shades.

	'Australia remain favourites for the Cup but the odds on them winning have lengthened and it’s no longer a one horse race' © Getty Images

Yesterday’s match in Sydney was a small step for England but a great (rain-assisted) leap for cricketing mankind. If this England team after the Ashes whitewash can beat Australia three times in a row, there’s hope for the rest of us. The World Cup suddenly looks like a contest instead of a prolonged green-and-gold victory lap.

From an Indian point of view, the difference between this Australian team and earlier ones is not so much Shane Warne’s absence as Glenn McGrath’s decline. Indian batsmen never bought into Warne’s mystique but McGrath was a different matter. No Indian ever sorted out McGrath. A decline, of course, is a relative thing: McGrath has lived alone on Everest so long that even a slide off the summit still leaves him at an altitude most bowlers never reach. Yesterday he took 2 for 41 off ten overs, which Zaheer Khan and Munaf Patel would gladly settle for, but he went for fifty runs in the first final against England without a wicket and he’d gone for fifty in the last league match against England. Five runs an over isn’t expensive in the context of contemporary one-day cricket, but it isn’t McGrathian. Australia remain favourites for the Cup but the odds on them winning have lengthened and it’s no longer a one horse race.

If this was the lesson of the England-Australia encounter, the other two matches provided a pointer or two about who might challenge Australia down the home straight. The South Africans are clearly the main contenders; the ICC rankings have that right. They killed India four times in a row and what they did to Pakistan yesterday was cruel. They’re a great fielding unit and they bat deep which helps but I can’t help thinking that their bowling is so bustlingly similar that anytime Shaun Pollock has an off day, they’re likely to get slaughtered. On the other hand, if there’s one team that’s on its knees giving thanks for Warne’s retirement, it’s this lot, so that’s another thing they have going for them.

But if I was a betting man I’d put my money on Sri Lanka. To beat India at home without Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralitharan (ie nine-tenths of their bowling attack) after the game seemed lost, needed extraordinary poise and nerve and this Sri Lankan team has both. They fielded like demons and in Kumar Sangakkara they have one of the cleverest men in cricket, a modern-day Mike Brearley with a difference: this man can bat. So can Mahela Jayawardene and Marvan Atapattu and I have a happy feeling that Sanath Jayasuriya, that Martin Luther of modern cricket who offends against orthodoxy every time he swings his angled scythe, is saving himself up for one last spasm of berserker violence on the world stage. And Lasith Malinga is so weird he’s wonderful: Sri Lanka is a kind of cricketing Galapagos, breeding exotic bowling actions in its island isolation.

	'Kumar Sangakkara is one of the cleverest men in cricket, a modern-day Mike Brearley with a difference: this man can bat' © Getty Images

Pakistan are number three in the ICC’s rankings and anyone with eyes knows that as individuals they’re so prodigiously gifted that eleven of them on a good day could win anything. But, as with India (only more so) the Pakistani whole is often considerably less than the sum of its constituent parts. Yesterday they played like they were collectively in the depressive phase of a bi-polar disorder. They have the remarkable Mohammad Asif, all round depth, and a great middle order, so they’re contenders but after yesterday’s performance you’d have to be a patriot or a clairvoyant to bet on them.

From the Indian point of view, yesterday’s game followed a recent pattern. Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar did moderately well, Rahul Dravid failed, Mahendra Singh Dhoni contributed but not decisively and the tail collapsed. The worrying thing about the game was that everyone apart from Anil Kumble and Dravid played reasonably well and we still lost.

The seamers did as well as anyone could expect and the four selected for the West Indies are no surprise: they pick themselves. Irfan Pathan’s passage was booked on a wish and a prayer. Dinesh Karthik’s selection in the World Cup 15 is understandable because he is insurance in case Dhoni is injured. That Robin Uthappa, on the strength of seven ODIs and two fifties, made the cut ahead of, say, VVS Laxman (who will now never play a World Cup match) is hard to credit. He has been chosen, I suspect, to carry the standard of youth, a responsibility once borne by RP Singh and VRV Singh and Suresh Raina. Greg Chappell, Dravid and the selectors have so fetishized youthfulness that they couldn’t, without embarrassing themselves, have picked a batting line-up that, with the exception of Virender Sehwag, was Made in the Nineties. For India’s sake and his, I hope Uthappa does well, otherwise he’ll be the latest sacrifice at the gory altar of New Blood. I can’t see a neutral punter backing us to win. On the other hand the odds on an Indian win in ’83 were 60 to one and I’m not a neutral punter. We can win this one…